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Wrestlemania weekend is in the books, and I'm back with another edition of The pROHfile. We've got a few things to cover today, but first I'd like to take a look back at this past weekend's ROH doubleshot in Orlando, Florida. Though ROH has had a presence in Florida for a few years due to their connection to FIP, this is the first time they've run an official ROH show this far south, and they were out to make an impression to all the wrestling fans who were in town for Wrestlemania. Word is they succeeded, as they drew well over a thousand fans to both shows.
I was happy to see ROH going over another company for a change, as they won this year's Dragon Gate Challenge three matches to one. Not for nothing, but as nice as it is for Japanese talent to come in and have great matches and make ROH guys look like a million bucks, you can pretty much count on them going over, and I think that makes ROH seem inferior as a general rule, so it was satisfying to say the least to see the Japanese guys jobbing for a change.
The big angle this weekend was whether Austin Aries would choose to join Age Of The Fall or side with Tammy Sytch. At first, he was noncommittal, saying that he would instead choose to focus on winning the ROH World Title from Nigel McGuinness. He did win his match on Friday against Dragon Gate's Genki Horiguchi (followed by AOTF's sales pitch and Lacey giving Tammy a DDT), but fell short in his match against McGuinness, though the match was said to be even better than the Rising Above match, which I have to see to believe because I was at the Rising Above match and it was off the charts. After the match, Aries left with Lacey, leading to AOTF teasing another attack on Tammy, but the Briscoes made the save. I'll ne interested to see where they go with Aries if he does join AOTF, because we're talking about a guy who is one of the top stars of the entire company, and I can't imagine him joining up and playing lackey to Jimmy Jacobs. That said, the push behind AOTF seems to have slowed a bit, and maybe getting a guy like Aries is what they need to get things going again, as having Aries on board would cement AOTF as a main event level stable.
In other Age Of The Fall news, they were the black sheep of ROH on Friday night as they were the only ones to lose to the Dragon Gate crew, as Jimmy Jacobs and Tyler Black...you know, the former ROH Tag Team Champions? Yeah, they lost to SHINGO and BxB Hulk. I'm sure they can play it like they don't care about representing ROH so it wasn't a big deal, but the point here is that they took the guys who are supposed to be a big deal and jobbed them out to a couple of guys who were going to be flying back to the other side of the planet at the end of the weekend, and they weren't even the top shelf Dragon Gate guys. They did, however, redeem themselves the following night by beating the Briscoes, getting a surprising submission win when Jacobs made Jay tap to the End Time. I guess AOTF is generally looking strong and are a focal point of nearly every show, but as I said, I think they're playing yo-yo too much with their push. AOTF has a ton of potential to be headlining (any or all of the members), but it's hard to get behind them when they're losing to the Dragon Gate B-Team or dropping the tag title two weeks after winning them.
Speaking of “now you're being pushed, now you're not,” Erick Stevens teamed with Go Shiozaki and CIMA in the main event of Dragon Gate Challenge II to defeat the No Remorse Corps, but his match on Saturday never happened, as he and Roderick Strong brawled for what was described as being about 18 minutes long, before being beaten down by the NRC and getting his hair cut. Again, what is the story here? What's with the start-stop pushes? It's really hard to get behind guys when they're pushed to the top of the company only to be chopped back down almost immediately. Believe me, I'm not one who whines for instant gratification pushes so my favorite wrestlers go to the top of the card right now and never lose again for all of time, but having AOTF and Stevens take a step back for every step forward makes them look like they can't consistently get it done and makes them look inferior.
Fortunately for the NRC, they don't have the same problem, as they are now being actively recruited by Larry Sweeney to join Sweet N Sour Incorporated. Sweeney asked them twice this weekend, and both times he was turned down by Roderick Strong, who said that the NRC is his group and they're not interested. I smell a Roderick face turn coming here, and I can't say that's entirely a bad thing. I don't know why it is, but Roderick is just more watchable to me as a babyface than he is as a heel, and I can see a scenario where Strong won't give in to Sweeney, but Romero and Richards sell out and leave Roderick laying.
Delirious didn't have a good weekend, losing to Nigel McGuinness on Friday and Go Shiozaki on Saturday. Wasn't Delirious one of the top faces in the company like a year ago? Has he hit his peak in ROH and is now destined to spend the rest of his days jobbing to Nigel, Shiozaki, and...god help me, Adam Pearce? Truth be told, if that is his fate, I think the midcard is the right place for him, because even though the occasional main event shot would be great, he's not somebody I can get behind as a main eventer, but I do think he's talented enough to have great semi-main matches, as well as a more than entertaining enough character to pull fun openers. Delirious can definitely be said to be versatile, but enough with the Pearce matches, please?
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Right now I'd like to take a look at Chris Hero And Claudio Castagnoli, formerly known as the Kings Of Wrestling. Are they better off as singles wrestlers or as a tag team? I've said in the past that I consider the Kings Of Wrestling to be one of the best teams I've ever seen that knew tag team wrestling and obviously worked very hard on their teamwork and double team moves. One of the problems when a tag team is broken up and the members are faced with singles careers is that one of them almost inevitably fades into the background while the other one shines. See Jannetty, Marty and Neidhart, Jim. But in the case of the Kings Of Wrestling, both men have fared exceedingly well in ROH (and on the indies in general) as singles wrestlers.
Claudio had a rough start to 2007, perhaps in part because there were no plans in place for him after he was set to leave ROH for WWE at the end of 2006. But he stuck it out and, after a superb performance in the Dragon Gate eight man on Wrestlemania weekend, started really hitting his stride and began connecting with the fans much more than he ever had in the past. The fans got past him turning on ROH during the CZW war and began to embrace him as one of their own. Claudio won the Race To The Top Tournament with a win over El Generico in an excellent match, and had two great matches with Takeshi Morishima for the ROH Title at the end of the summer before settling into a feud with Hero, a feud in which Claudio won far more matches than he lost.
But despite losing every singles match in the series to Claudio, Hero developed into a legit main eventer in his own right. After hooking up with Larry Sweeney during the breakup of the Kings Of Wrestling, the two men assembled a motley group of misfits reminiscent of Raven's series of cult followers over the years. He had success in the ring as well, beating Nigel Mcguinness in a Pure Wrestling Rules match and winning Survival Of The Fittest. His win-loss record hasn't been that great, but he's stolen the show with his outlandish acrobatics and cowardly heel tactics during his matches, become a focal point of every ROH PPV, and his comedy act helped carry the four way elimination match at Final Battle 2007. Though he fell short every time, he's gotten a number of shots at the ROH Title, and each time he got that shot he made himself believeable as a guy who could win the title. Not bad for a guy who is supposedly held back by Gabe Sapolsky.
In addition to the pushes both men are getting, they're both incredibly over with the fans. But as successful as they are individually, you can't argue with their success as a tag team. In ROH alone, though they had the odd tag team match here and there throughout the CZW war, they were given the ROH World Tag Team Title on what was their first weekend regularly teaming together in ROH, ending Austin Aries and Roderick Strong's record-length title reign in the process, and also hold a victory over the Briscoes. Taking into account their broader success on the indies, they held the ROH, CZW, and CHIKARA Tag Team Titles all at the same time, and almost won the PWG Tag Team Title on top of that. If three promotions are all willing to give you their Tag Team Title at the same time, you must be doing something right.
For right now, Claudio and Hero are getting strong singles pushes and the prospect of them teaming again anytime soon isn't very likely given how far apart their storyline characters are in philosophy at the moment. Claudio looks like a good possibility to be ROH World Champion maybe later this year, and Hero's always in the title picture as well. However, I have to think that they'll team again in ROH down the line, at least on occasion. I don't see Claudio ever turning heel again, so Hero would have to turn face before I see it happening unless they do a one off deal like their 2 out of 3 falls match against the Briscoes last summer. No matter which way they end up doing it, I think it's impressive that both men can be as successful they've been in singles and also as a team.
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As I said earlier on, and I don't know if I'm alone or not, but I have to wonder what the story is with Erick Stevens' push. There's no doubt that Gabe Sapolsky loves the guy, and Gabe himself has said that he knew right away that he wanted to bring Stevens up to ROH and was just waiting for the right opportunity. He had a strong start to his ROH career with a series of squash wins before cooling off a bit when he became a member of the Resilience. Unlike his partner Matt Cross, Stevens wasn't made to look completely inept and weak, and was built in a way that you knew that no matter how tough things got, he was going to fight it out to the very end. He turned in several great matches against the No Remorse Corps and Takeshi Morishima, and was written out for a few weeks after doing an injury angle in New Jersey in October.
By the time he came back, Austin Aries had disbanded the Resilience and Stevens was on his own, and so the push began. He defeated Roderick Strong at Final Battle 2007 and won the FIP Title, then went on in January to defeat both his former mentor Austin Aries and Bryan Danielson in one weekend. He followed that up by defeating Davey Richards, whom he had dropped several submission losses to in 2007. It seemed like Stevens was just beginning to get the push of a lifetime...and then he dropped the FIP Title back to Roderick Strong before he even had the belt for two months.
What happened there? Gabe's been around Stevens for several years, so I doubt he suddenly saw something he didn't like and decided to get the title off of him, but the title loss was very abrupt and was a jarring speedbump in the push that it looked like Stevens was just at the beginning of. Stevens is still around and still looking strong, so I can't imagine that he was getting punished for anything, but the title loss came out of nowhere and took away an important new element of Stevens' character that I think would have helped him grow and take the next step. Defending that title would have given him a reason to work with a wide array of wrestlers without it looking like he was just getting stuck in random matches for the hell of it.
So now that he's no longer FIP Champion, where does Stevens go from here? Does he have even MORE matches against Roderick Strong and the No Remorse Corps? He would have to do that to get the FIP Title back, but he spent almost all of 2007 working against those guys, and he'd be spinning his wheels spending another couple of months with them. On the other hand, what other options are there? Could he get a partner and challenge Romero and Richards for the ROH World Tag Team Title? That would make sense from a storyline perspective and give him something new to work towards, but putting him back in a group dynamic would be counterproductive to the presumed goal of building him as a singles star. Does he start feuding with someone else? If so, it'll most likely be a midcard feud, which would leave him going in the same circles he would with the No Remorse Corps.
Stevens has a great look, is a good wrestler, and has oodles of potential, but unless there are bigger plans for him, I think taking the FIP Title off of Stevens was a mistake. If it was just meant to be a short term reign from the beginning to give us a big moment at Final Battle and he was always intended to move right back into the midcard, then I have to question that decision because it's that type of indecisive start-stop-start booking that kills so many WWE and TNA wrestlers, and ROH is generally known for being more committed to its storylines than that.
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And that's another one in the books. I'll be back before you know it, but until then all feedback can be sent to stuwrestling@hotmail.com. You can also check out my wrestling blog at stuwrestling.livejournal.com. Thanks for reading and I'll see you soon.
